World of Warcraft Legion Removes Hidden Custom Zoom Option

If you are one of those you like to use the not very well hidden custom zoom feature in World of Warcraft Legion via the console/WTF CVars, we have some bad news courtesy of Blizzard Entertainment. Blizzard is removing custom zoom so you will be restricted to what the UI slider permits.

The good news is that this only affects the people who actually find and use this feature, but to the rest the game will feel normal and natural like it does right now. Others, might find this feature very annoying and restrictive in the beginning, so why is Blizzard doing this?

In a broad range of gaming genres (from RTS to Action RPG), being able to zoom out and see more of the world around you provides an objective advantage in the form of information. Due to that competitive advantage, camera-unlocking or increased zoom distance are features commonly found in third-party hacks for a variety of games. Whatever the maximum allowed, that’s what competitive players will use in order to maximize performance, even at the expense of the game’s overall look and feel.

We strongly believe that there needs to be parity in this area between players who are using the default UI and those who have addons or knowledge of hidden console variables. One option was certainly to just allow the in-game slider to go all the way up to the CVar hardcap. But that scale is beyond the one around which the game was designed at its core. The development team builds the world, its art, its combat mechanics, and other interactions, around the base UI experience and scale. At the 3.4-CVar zoom level, your heroic Warcraft avatar takes up about as much screen-space as one of the dozens of marines you might control in a game of Starcraft.

So basically, this is being done to make sure no one has any sort of advantage while playing World of Warcraft Legion. It is understandable that some might find it hard to play World of Warcraft after the removal of this feature but things will be normal as soon as you get use to it and play like the rest of us.